LIFE'S WORK; It's Summer: Isn't Anyone at Work?

By LISA BELKIN

Published: August 9, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

IT'S a wonder you are reading this article at all.

This was very nearly a blank page, because almost everyone I called to interview was out of town. Also on vacation is my baby sitter, which means that I had to interrupt my writing 9,667,248 times to drive one or the other of my (not quite yet licensed) teenagers to whatever enriching (and far-flung) summer activity was scheduled next. Once back at my desk, I was hot, cranky and in no mood to write. The editor who usually motivates me out of funks was away for two weeks, and the editor above her was away for one of those weeks, and I am feeling the need for another iced coffee break.

How does any work get done in the summer?

Each season brings its own pace to the workplace. There is an energy in the air in the spring, winter is about hunkering down, and autumn feels crisp, like the start of school. Summer is slow and thick, and is an invitation to do anything but work.

Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of ''Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff,'' likens the ripe months of summer to the last months of pregnancy. When pregnant, she said, ''I have a reason to slow down. In the summer, I have a reason, too.''

And Judy Gruen, a humorist and the author of ''The Women's Daily Irony Supplement,'' described her summer ''productivity issues'' in the following e-mail message: ''I've gotten very little work done since I was told that it was a crime against humanity to appear in public wearing sandals with unpainted toenails. Now I have been shamed into hiding at home, practicing painting my toenails deftly enough to be seen in public. This has cut considerably into my writing time.''

Ms. Gruen, Ms. Hohlbaum and I are hardly alone in our summer ennui. The Workplace Institute, the research and education arm of Kronos Inc., a productivity management company, has dubbed this ''Seasonal Absence Syndrome'' and reports that 39 percent of the 1,077 full-time employees it surveyed admitted to calling in sick in order to ''enjoy a day off during the summer season.'' Candystand.com -- a Web site devoted to online games, which sees an uptick in traffic during summer business hours -- polled 1,766 adults and found that 65 percent said it was harder to concentrate on work during the summer.

This season's spinning-your-wheels feeling is made worse by the seemingly contradictory fact that workers actually take less vacation.

''The trend is to forgo blocks of allotted time,'' said John Challenger, of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive employment firm. Fearing that work will pile up in their absence, or that the boss will notice they are not indispensable, more employees are taking their vacation in smaller parcels. ''Three-day weekends and shortened weekdays are much more popular,'' he said.

About 12 percent of companies nationwide give employees Fridays off as a matter of policy, according to a study of 900 large companies by Hewitt Associates, a human resources firm. The result is a choppier feel to the working summer -- here today, gone tomorrow, back the day after -- and a general crankiness when you're at the office.

For many, the culprit is the heat. That is certainly what's slowing the dozen employees of O'Berry Cavanaugh, an advertising firm in Bozeman, Mont., where a rare heat wave brought 100-plus temperature days. The office has no air-conditioning, so all in-office meetings are scheduled in the morning, and when afternoon appointments are a must, they are held at a local coffee shop.

For others, however, the main reason for summer torpor is laziness -- everyone else's.

''The buyer is gone for a month, so you can't get in to see the house,'' said Lisa Maysonet, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan. ''When the buyer comes back, the broker goes away. They tell you 'I'm not in town on Friday' or 'I'm not in town on Monday.' '' This July, she said, she tried for three weeks to bring a client to see a particular town house, then gave up.

Another, oft mentioned obstacle to work is children. The younger the children, the more complicated the scheduling, but as I mentioned, I have teenagers, and I have never appreciated the blessed constancy of school as much as I do this summer.

There is the possibility of camp for school-age children, but it is not an option for all working parents, in that it costs the earth. And even camp doesn't last forever.

Barbara Marcus is president of Parents in a Pinch, which provides national emergency backup child care. The last weeks of August, she said, are ''the gap, when camp is out and school hasn't started.'' Parents fill that gap by ditching work, she said, and they don't call her, yet. They call ''in September when they are desperate to make up all the work they didn't get done over the summer.''

Kirin Christianson, the vice president of Integrative Health Care in Scottsdale, Ariz., is already feeling a bit of that desperation. She spent her summer overseeing a major office renovation, one she thought she could handle with her children around. But ''the kids refuse to go to one more fabric, tile or furniture store,'' she said.

''The really humorous thing,'' she added, is trying to schedule a time to meet with a client who also is a parent. ''It is not just our schedules we are trying to work around,'' she said. ''We have to coordinate our efforts with my baby sitter, their baby sitter, our kids' summer camps, husbands' schedules, and vacations.''

To make the rest of us feel particularly sluggish, some people insist that summer is invigorating. A few are probably saying this because they have to -- doctors in academic hospitals, for instance, where the new students arrive on July 1. Or owners of businesses in beach towns, where a year's worth of sales must happen before Labor Day.

He admits he did not feel this way last summer, when he was a banker at JPMorgan. ''In banking, slacking off in the summer is part of the job,'' he said. But as an entrepreneur, selling a product that is half a summery gin and tonic, he has learned to love driving his logo painted car around the Hamptons and hawking his goods.

Those of us without Mr. Vohra's energy, however, are choosing to flow with the (languid) tide, rather than swim against it.

Usually Diane K. Danielson, chief executive of the networking site Downtownwomensclub.com, leaves a frenetic ''Out of Office'' e-mail message, detailing when she'll check in. This year, however, she simply wrote: ''Gone sailing. Back next Monday.''

As you read this, I will be packing for a two-week vacation. I've decided to follow Ms. Danielson's lead. My own message will read: ''I've turned off my computer until the end of August. Let's talk then.''

DRAWING (DRAWING BY DANIEL HOROWITZ)

Correction: August 23, 2007, Thursday
The Life's Work column on Aug. 9, about low productivity in summer, misstated the name of the research division of Kronos Inc., a productivity management company, which did a survey showing that 39 percent of the 1,077 full-time employees it questioned admitted to calling in sick to enjoy a day off in summer. It is the Workforce Institute, not the Workplace Institute.